The Man Who Helped Build the First Tesla Believes He Can Decarbonize Big Rig Trucks
We talk with Range Energy founder Ali Javidan about his fascinating career and plans to transform an industry.0:00 / 0:00
Strap in folks, because we’ve got a banger of an episode for you. In truth, we could have, and probably should have busted this one up into three separate podcasts, because that’s how storied and interesting this week’s guest, Ali Javidan—the founder and CEO of Range Energy—is. We begin with some talk about structural engineering (what he actually went to school for) and his early career building roads for CalTrans in Northern California. He also spends some time shredding one of the many falsehoods plaguing EV adoption, that electric vehicles damage the roads (spoiler alert: they don’t). However, while car-adjacent, roads were not his true calling, so Ali went on to building race cars.
From there, fate stepped in and he got a call from a small startup electric car company called Tesla. This was before a certain South African (yes, him) had purchased the company. Ali worked on the original Tesla Roadster as well as much more importantly, the Tesla Model S. In fact, he personally set up the two Model S sedans that we used back in 2012 when we named it our 2013 MotorTrend Car of the Year. When the book on the history of the electric automobile is written, this part of today’s podcast could be a chapter.
We finish up our conversation with Ali Javidan by talking about his new company, Range Energy. The idea here is that replacing every Class 8 big rig vehicle on the road is going to be hard and it's going to take a long time. But if you could improve the trailer each one tows via electrification, it could go a long way toward lowering trucking emissions. Three parts get retrofitted onto an existing trailer—an e-axle, a battery, and a smart kingpin. Ali claims that just by doing that modification, fuel consumption can be lowered by at least 40 percent and emissions by as much as 70 percent. Not only that, but the technology scales, so this would work for private trailers as well.
